This blog started, as I said yesterday, as a place to store weird moments of synchronicity between my reading and listening. Another one of my reasons for writing here was to promote historical and cultural studies books, which tend to be overlooked in popular literary publications and book blogs. I had first noticed this problem as I began reading around the "bookternet" and encountered the way that many bloggers defined the term microhistory. As I investigated what was going on, I realized that this was part of a bigger problem for history and historians. When they feature historical work at all, most publications, from book review sections in mainstream newspapers to blogs, generally discuss the same set of blockbuster trade non-fiction titles that tend to be quite conservative in their representation of how historical change happens. There are also tons of books listed as history that are not actually history, but general non-fiction titles, often about current events. The most-reviewed or listed history books tend to be by a small group of authors whose work is unrepresentative of contemporary historical concerns. To make an analogy to the fiction world, the gamut is short, running from the historian equivalents of James Patterson all the way to. ...Donna Tartt.
This popular preference for trade books by journalists or other popularizers makes a lot of sense, given that most scholars aren't writing for popular audiences, and their books can be expensive and are often difficult to read. Probably more important though, is that university presses lack the promotional budgets of commercial publishers, making it quite rare for scholarly works of history to be reviewed or advertised outside academic journals, or to appear on the shelves of bookstores. Given this reality, it should not be surprising that it's uncommon for even voracious literature readers familiar with independent literary publishing to be aware of new scholarly books.
I used the label "conservative" because the topics most commonly covered by the most popular historical trade publications are military history and presidential biography, with the occasional famous historical sensation: such as a major disaster, crime or subsequent trial. While popular histories of disasters, crimes and trials (including the ever-popular Salem Witch Trials) offer the possibility for radical analysis, presidential and military history tend to represent the most politically and intellectually conservative side of the historical profession. For example, African-American historian of the Jefferson-Hemings story, Annette Gordon-Reed has argued that the musical Hamilton successfully masks both Hamilton's own conservatism and an old-fashioned view of the founders in general through its excellent music and innovative casting:
There is no question that having a black cast insulates the play from criticisms that might otherwise appear. The genius of black music and black performance styles is used to sell a picture of the founding era that has been largely rejected in history books. Viewers (both white and black) can celebrate without discomfort because black people are playing the men who have been, of late, subjected to much criticism. Imagine Hamilton with white actors—there are white rappers, and not all of the songs are rap. Would the rosy view of the founding era grate? Would we notice the failure to portray any black characters, save for a brief reference to Sally Hemings?In the interests of promoting the critical standards for diversity of author and subject matter that many contemporary bloggers call for in the literary world, I offer my friends on the bookternet these alternatives to Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton.
1.Try Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello. This book came out of Norton, and has already had a wide audience. She wrote it for lay-readers and academic readers alike. It's a history of slaves and descendants from the Jefferson plantation. In addition to being written for a wide audience, it won Gordon-Reed a MacArthur Genius grant.
2. For an international perspective on the 18th century revolutions, see Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic Based on decades of research, it features stories of slave-rebellions and sailors' protests on the docks from Liverpool to Boston, it shows how the story of the American, French and English revolutions was made by a multi-racial seafaring working class. Great for fans of pirates too.
3. Showing the collapse of the class solidarity on lines of race through the story of colonial Virginia, a book that continues to be relevant long after its initial publication is Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. This book has provided a key piece of the history of slavery in the British colonies, and is one of the grounding texts in contemporary studies of whiteness in the United States.
4. A panoramic and passionately written classic worth returning to is Vincent Harding's There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. This book is a narrative account of Black history, with an amazing chapter on Nat Turner. I have used it as textbook when teaching African-American history and students invariably love it.
5. Especially around the time of the beginning of the War in Iraq, conflicts related to which are still broiling, lots of people I knew were interested in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Two books that go back to the distant roots are, most recently and vividly portrayed Matthew Frye Jacobson's Barbarian Virtues about U.S. imperial culture; and the classic, more detailed and comprehensive but also possibly drier, Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams, now out with a new introduction by Greg Grandin.
6 The 1920s remain a popular era for history readers, whether because of interest in jazz and flappers or prohibition and organized crime. While there are a number of specific studies on the particularlities of crime, prohibition, jazz culture and the great migration, the best and most readable survey of the entire decade that I've read is Lynne Dumenil's The Modern Temper. Another between-the-wars book (which I haven't read, but plan to on the basis of Matthew Frye Jacobson's blurb) is Joel Dinerstein's Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology and African American Culture Between the Wars
7. . If you're interested in the history of the Great Depression, skip biographies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and read about the labor movement and Communist Party of this era. The classic local case study is Robin D.G. Kelley's still-wonderful book, Hammer and Hoe which tells the story of Black Alabama communists in the 1930s. Randi Storch's Red Chicago is a newer, detailed study of the Communist Party in Chicago that draws material released from the Moscow archives in the 1990s. It also gets high marks for readability.
8. For a story of the modern Civil Rights Movement beyond the great male leaders, read Barbara Ransby's history of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
9. For those interested in the history of the labor movement and want an experiential view from workers, try the oral history landmark study of coal miners by Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County. It would be hard to over-estimate the respect and admiration that oral history practicioners have for this scholar and this book.
10. If you want to read micro-history and you're interested in true-crime, take a look at Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett, a story that starts with the murder of a 19th century New York City prostitute and opens out into a more general history of sex and gender in antebellum America.
* And finally, because we just can't get enough of the Salem Witch Trials, one of the most studied events in American history, here's my favorite. Read Carolyn F. Karlsen's 1998 feminist study, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
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